VORTEX: 1. A mass of wind or water that spins quickly and pulls things into its center. 2. [usually singular] written. a situation that has a powerful effect on people’s lives and that influences their behavior, even if they do not want it to.

Preston Avenue is our antagonist to be challenged by multiple interventions at multiple sites that (re) integrate diverse residential, industrial, institutional, commercial and ecological contexts along its length. This Vortex can be our most meaningful and committed workshop that produces results relevant to the community where we live, work, and learn. Last year’s Residential Colleges Vortex on Ivy Road is changing the University’s understanding of residential culture and the well-being of students. Can this year’s Vortex focus local attention on a more inclusive urbanism? Preston Avenue has become an urban wall--the spatial manifestation of racial and social segregation intertwined with misguided implementations of urban reform and transportation planning. Developed as a connecting ridge, Preston Avenue today is a wide road that bisects and cuts into and interrupts the urban fabric of streets and housing that still exist both north and south of this wide road.Preston Avenue at its east end is one of the African-American population’s most painful urban scars: the trench that urban renewal of the 1960s created by ripping through the continuous fabric of well-established neighborhoods near Charlottesville’s downtown. And farther west toward the University, Preston Avenue at its intersection with 10th Street and Grady Avenue is the manifestation of an aborted and misguided transportation plan that destroyed more urban form, street patterns, residences, and businesses, further disconnecting neighborhoods from family, friends, parkland, and essential goods and services. Can this Vortex imagine an inclusive, urban, and connective space rather than a trench? What can be done with urban form, with architecture, with public space, with street connections, and mobility? Can the natural and cultural histories of this place inform and help envision another chapter? Can new interventions redeem any of the 1960’s and 1970’s intentions for urban renewal and connectivity? How can we create Urbanity in this place?